What Can Public Health Administration Learn from the Decision-Making Processes during COVID-19?

Abstract

Human decision-making is prone to biases and the use of heuristics that can result in making logical errors and erroneous causal connections, which were evident during COVID-19 policy developments and potentially contributed to the inadequate and costly responses to COVID-19. There are decision-making frameworks and tools that can improve organisational decision-making. It is currently unknown as to what extent public health administrations have been using these structured organisational-level decision-making processes to counter decision-making biases. Current reviews of COVID-19 policies could examine not just the content of policy decisions but also how decisions were made. We recommend that understanding whether these decision-making processes have been used in public health administration is key to policy reform and learning from the COVID-19 pandemic. This is a research and practice gap that has significant implications for a wide range of public health policy areas and potentially could have made a profound difference in COVID-19-related policy responses.